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On Poetry: Don Paterson
Mostly applies to poetry but also a good introduction to writing in general. There is, of course, only one piece of advice I can possibly offer to anyone thinking seriously about writing poetry ... No, I won't say it. But everything you've heard about poets is true: the poverty, the insanity, the early death. However anyone serious about poetry will have started before they've had a chance weigh up the risks. So: assuming that you have already made that fatal error - here are a few pointers. The most important one can be summed up in two words, however: read poetry. If you don't love reading poetry, you're no more likely to write a half-decent poem than a person who hates music is to write a great string quartet. Once you've read a lot of great poetry, read a lot of mediocre poetry, and try to articulate what the difference is. Make your poems up. "Poem" just means "a thing made", so don't steal them - even from yourself. "Interesting or poetic things that happened to you" rarely are, in a poem. Your job is to shock the reader into a moment of wakefulness. This means the poem will have to surprise, delight, scare you or blow you away first - in the actual writing of it, not the idea you had for it. A poem is a document of an epiphany as it's happening. Write the poem you're writing, not the one you want to write. The poem will have ideas of its own, and they're better than yours. Be bold and be original. Poems must speak memorably. Don't confuse originality with novelty. For something to be original, it needs to be already partly familiar to the readers, otherwise they can't verify its originality, only its weirdness. Don't be too abstract - or too concrete. Most great poems achieve a natural balance between thought and image. Find a happy medium between imagistic clutter and airy abstraction. Stanza means "room", so furnish it accordingly. Think of images as pieces of furniture, and thought as the space that relates them meaningfully. Don't make rooms where there's no room to move, and don’t make rooms with nothing in them. You want people to linger there, walk around, look at things, and think about them. Sound and sense are the same thing for poets: unify one and you unify the other. Poets like to use repetitions of the same consonantal sounds, and contrast them with careful variation of the vowel sounds, against which their rhyme and assonance can leap out. Form and rhyme and metre should be the very engine of your writing, not something you tart poems up with towards the end of the process. Many poems, for all their brilliant imagery and metaphor, are boring because of their repetitive syntax. One easy way to cure this is to think about the way a poem moves through time and space; in other words, shoot your poem like a Hitchcock or Kieslowski. (A poem of Heaney's will often go something like: trackingshot/ zoom/flashback/dissolve/pan/fast-forward/jumpcut/ tracking shot/still.) To accommodate those movements, you naturally have to write interesting, varied sentences. Use metaphor. Poems try to say things normally inaccessible to speech, and make us look again at the familiar by alienating it. Train yourself to experience the world anew, to blur its human categories and see the pavements frying with rain, the sea-spume in the beer glass, the black wheat in the sea at night, or hear the whoopee cushion in the alto saxophone, the distant gunfire in your Rice Krispies. With enough practice, this stuff should flow like water from a tap. (The trick is learning how to turn it off. See under 'insanity'.) Be patient. A poem is a process and not an operation. The only real joy you get from poetry is writing the stuff - and anyone who is desperate to get the writing over with as quickly as possible is no poet. Towards the end of the process, read your own poems as if they were someone else's: only then will you see the bad lines. This is the hardest lesson of all, and the one thing that marks out the serious poets. Keep the company of better poets than yourself, and learn to take criticism. Remember the poem isn't you, and poetry must be a generous act. You're trying to give it away, not keep it. [Source] [Published in The Times, 9/10/09]